Welcome to the API The Docs Podcast

With our three Mironeer guests, DevRel Lead Anthony Roux and Senior Techwriters Mira Balani and Marco Spinello, we talked about how they joined their teams, what they have learnt since, how and by whom their developer docs came to be as they are today, and what two documentarians are to do if they disagree. 

Our guest is Anthony Sansone, staff technical writer at MongoDB, who has spent 20+ years in computer hardware, software, and services, specializing in data protection and user security. His experience ranges from startups to large multinational companies. In this episode, Anthony shares his insights about the techwriters’ onboarding and the inspiration you can get from new hires.

Or, maybe you could map it: what does each of you do, why, and how? We converse about integration of practices and practice networks with Marc Burgauer, co-founder of Contextualise. Together with Chris McDermott, they assist large organizations in their transformation efforts through maturity mapping. We are teasing out our ideas on how can the understanding of social practice theory–and the acceptance of complexity–possibly help write better technical documentation. How can we better ease and inform the users of the docs into the context in which the artifact operates? What would be the minimum shared vocabulary and methods to change anything for the better in a persistent, self-stabilizing socio-technical system–our workplace–and do we need to name practice theory at all for it?

We converse about integration of practices and practice networks with Marc Burgauer, co-founder of Contextualise. Together with Chris McDermott, they assist large organizations in their transformation efforts through maturity mapping. 

We asked DevRel Kristyn Bryan and Application Architect Dmitry Pashkevich from the Calendly API team about the new, v2 of their API and the upgraded devportal. Why and how did they redesign the legacy API? They adopted a design-first approach to building APIs. How does this new strategy manifest in their daily jobs, what are they now doing differently? What are their teams' practices with customer feedback, and with internal mentoring?

Interview with Ruby Batallones, Technical Writer at Adyen and Aleksei Akimov, Head of API at Adyen

Involve your technical writers already from the API design discussions: this can help ensure a consistent user experience across all APIs, and in finding the middle ground between the usability requirements and the architecture requirements.

At Adyen, technical writers have the ways and means to add and maintain the descriptions in the source code, they can make sure that all the bits and pieces are linked together and enough context is provided everywhere. This practice brought that techwriters habitually use the developer tools as well, and have a deeper technical understanding of the API, which in turn enables better communications earlier on.

The recently open sourced Adyen Explorer and documentation won 2 prizes at the 2019 DevPortal Awards: Best API Reference Documentation and Best Decision Maker Documentation.

Our guests are Ruby Batallones Technical Writer at Adyen, former solution architect and implementation engineer, and Aleksei Akimov, who started his career in software development, then added technical writing, was leading the Documentation & Developer Experience team and is now responsible for Adyen API design, strategy, and governance.

The hosts are Laura Vass (Editor of Developer Portals Newsletter, Co-Founder of Pronovix) and Anett Pozsár (Senior Technical Writer, Pronovix).